Certainly few modern editors could produce such a leader as he did on Dugald Stewart (Aug. 26, 1854), or upon the _Encyclopoedia Britannica_ (April 30, 1842), or could, finding themselves for a day in London, 'when time hung heavy on my hands,' buy a cheap reprint of Eugene Sue's _Wandering Jew_ and convert its hurried perusal into a capital paper on the conflict between Continental Ultramontanism and Liberalism. The individuality of the writer and the tenacity with which he held to his opinions gave the journal a tone naturally impossible to an ordinary party paper. The great mass of the readers of _The Witness_ were of course Liberals, yet he strenuously contended against making it an organ of any political party. Part of the prospectus ran--'_The Witness_ will not espouse the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and divide the country. Public measures, however, will be weighed as they present themselves, in an impartial spirit, and with care proportioned to their importance.' He had noticed, he said, the Church of Scotland for a time converted by Conservatism into a mine against the Whigs, and he was determined that no 'tool-making politician' should again convert it to a party weapon. It was to remain the organ of 'the Free Church people against Whig, Tory, Radical, and Chartist.' So careful was he of the good name of the paper that he 'often retained communications beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding their real value.' Chalmers read the paper to the last with approval, and this was a source of joy and support to Miller. Nothing but such a wise supervision could have piloted _The Witness_ through the abuse and the inventions of the Tory organs. When the _Edinburgh Advertiser_, of June 13, 1848, could try to improve on that rhetorical flight of Barrère, characteristically fathered by its author on 'an ancient author,' about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants, by an assertion that _The Witness_ had 'menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and the bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled in buttonholes on the streets of Paris!'--proof was naturally wanting. A phantom of a 'grey discrowned head sounding hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall' was also served up by that paper, in its devotion to the house of Buccleuch, as a threat in which the irate scribe professed to detect a subtle attack on the House of Hanover in the interests of the Free Church. 'I am a Whig, in politics,' he said, 'never a Radical or Conservative.' He had no cheap sympathy with the working men, for them he had seen on their worst side. 'Three-fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery) and nine-tenths of their vagabondism will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who like Hogarth's "Careless Apprentice," neglected the opportunity of their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.' He was no believer in household, much less in universal, suffrage, and as an admirer of Delolme's views on our constitution, the radical he regarded as a 'political quack,' convinced as he was that 'those who think must govern those that toil.' But he advocated, along with Guthrie, a system of undenominational education of a kind pretty much what is now established, a moderate extension of the franchise, abolition of entail, and the game laws. The Maynooth grant and Macaulay he opposed. He was an Oliverian for Ireland, and the cause of much trouble in the most distressful country he viewed as associated with that subsidy, which he would have preferred to see converted into a grant for science.